What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Voice, AI, and the Future of Communications
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The communication technology landscape is evolving at breakneck speed, and Mitel is at the forefront with a clear strategy focused on "innovation with purpose." In this enlightening conversation, Mitel's Chief Technology Officer Luiz Domingos reveals how his 30+ years of industry experience shapes the company's approach to modernizing communications.
Domingos articulates Mitel's four strategic pillars—experiences, hybrid deployments, vertical applications, and AI—that guide their product development and innovation efforts. What truly sets their strategy apart is a deliberate focus on frontline workers, a massive yet traditionally underserved segment that most UC vendors have overlooked while focusing on knowledge workers. Their recently launched Workflow Studio platform exemplifies this approach, offering low-code/no-code capabilities to create specialized communications workflows for industries like healthcare, hospitality, and finance.
Strategic partnerships play a crucial role in Mitel's vision. Their collaboration with Zoom delivers what Domingos describes as "the most seamless integration" between Zoom's collaboration capabilities and Mitel's voice platforms. Similarly, their Genesys partnership complements their new Mitel CX contact center offering. But perhaps most fascinating is their three-pronged AI strategy: Edge AI solutions for highly regulated environments, voice-driven AI assistants leveraging Mitel's deep voice expertise, and AI-model agnostic workflows that provide flexibility and future-proofing. Their work on AI voice authentication that can detect deepfakes points to a future where security and convenience coexist perfectly.
Ready to see how Mitel's innovations could transform your communications infrastructure? Explore their solutions designed specifically for your industry's unique challenges and discover how their strategic approach to AI and hybrid deployments can protect your investments while preparing you for what's next.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone. I'm here with one of my favorites and I don't say that lightly Luis Domingos from Mitel Luis, how are you?
Speaker 2:Oh good, Evan, and very good to be here. Nice talking to you again, Thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:Great to catch up Enterprise Connect, the annual big industry get-together. But in advance of that, I would love to touch base on a few different topics and maybe start with some introductions to Mitel for those few people who might not have heard of Mitel, but also you and your role at Mitel and background. We've known each other for quite some time and I'd love the viewers to learn a little bit about your bio and background.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well Mitel. For the ones that are not familiar with the company, mitel is a longstanding company in the unified communication contact center solutions in communication in general, so we've been in the market for a good time. So we have a huge installed base, we have global presence and we invest a lot in technology and we have a very profile or a very nice portfolio of products out there. And regarding myself, I am Mitel Chief Technology Officer. I joined Mitel a year and a half ago, coming from one of Mitel acquisitions from Unify, which is an European presence for communications and collaborations, and now I'm very glad to be part of this family and I'm in the business for a long time. So I'm over, I'm gonna date myself, but I'm about 30 years in the business of communications and I've been doing a very present and evolve with the technology through the years and I've been CTO in this role for seven years now, prior at Unify and now with Mitel, and I really like technology. I enjoy really discussing and addressing portfolio improvements and evolution around technology.
Speaker 2:So that's my area of excitement and I'm very glad to have a conversation with you here around what we have at Mitel and how we're driving our future.
Speaker 1:Brilliant and what do you see your role as CTO leading the CTO group at Mitel being? How do you think about navigating the current landscape and continuing to fuel innovation and differentiation? What's your thought there?
Speaker 2:for sure, but innovation with purpose, and that's what we're trying to do at Mitel. In my role is really ensure that we have innovation in alignment with the business, which is very important, correct so, and last year, when I joined, I started to create our innovation pillars four pillars of innovation where we put our focus on innovation and align with the business. Innovation, where we put our focus on innovation and align with the business. You might have spoken to our CMO, eric Hansen, and he gave you a better overview of where we are with the business objectives, but the innovation strategy aligns with those four pillars in general.
Speaker 2:First is experiences ensuring that in UC and contact center, we have the best experience for our customers and bring all the necessary enhancements and evolutions to them. Second, on hybrid deployments we want our solutions. We come from a legacy, our heritage of premise, but today all our products can be deployed in any infrastructure, including cloud. Third is about virtual vertical applications. We want to not just play in the horizontal communications world. We want to ensure our solutions also address vertical needs from various industries out there. And last but not least, the fourth pillar is AI. We're investing significantly in AI around our portfolio to ensure that we have evolving elements that permeate our portfolio and, at the same time, enable us to evolve and provide everything the customers are needed for productivity, efficiency and customer experience.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, that will certainly keep you busy. And let's talk about change and disruption. You're no stranger to that. You've seen a lot of changes over the years. You continue to navigate that. So with all that change, I mean, how do you think about differentiating yourself in the current landscape against so many different options that customers have when it comes to communications, collaboration and contact center?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the customers can get very confused, as you can imagine correct. So there's a segment of options and many times they need support, they need advice, they need consultancy. At Mitel we have our services organization with a lot of advisory services for our customers to help them navigate and see how they create the best solution that attends their business needs. We're just creating an AI consultancy in our services team for that purpose. But in general, we want to ensure that our solutions in the UC market are addressing not only knowledge workers and horizontal play, but also the needs of frontline workers. Frontline workers are the largest installed base as you can imagine out there, and we see them underserved with UC solutions, which favored a lot the knowledge workers in the last years.
Speaker 2:Our differentiation goal with innovation is to go beyond the horizontal play, deliver products that serve customers in adjacent areas of our core comms and collabs and contact centers and give them more than what the other vendors provide. That's our play of differentiation really delivering specific and verticalized options for our customers. As an example, we just launched a low-code, no-code application platform called Workflow Studio, and Workflow Studio enables and creates significant flexibility in creating specialized EUC and contact center flows for our communication solutions, and we are seeing use cases using Workflow Studio in hospitality, healthcare, finance, trading and Workflow Studio as well embeds components of AI large language models that also bring AI into the mix.
Speaker 1:Wow, brilliant. Can't wait to see more of that. And you helped define the technology roadmap at Mitel. Maybe talk about what that means in terms of, you know, helping your customers navigate the future as well as protecting their you know investments they've made.
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly our technology roadmap plays an important role. We are a vendor, correct. We're focused on products and technology to serve an important role. We are a vendor, correct, we're focused on products and technology to serve our customer needs, given our huge install base. You see, modernization is one of the main directions we want to have in the R&D activities and is the main priority to my teams ensuring that our products can be deployed efficiently in any infrastructure I mentioned before, correct. So we want to ensure that we are not seen as a telephony premise vendor, because it's not the case anymore.
Speaker 2:We can deploy our products in hybrid infrastructures. Hybrid plays an important element of our strategy and any consumption models. We can also deploy our voice infrastructure today with any hypervisors, any hyperscale infrastructures. We have one case already in the UK where we have OpenScape running on Oracle Cloud for our healthcare customer, so very novel. As far as deployment model, our portfolio roadmap now in 2025, where we're executing, has goals associated with flexibility for communications, collaborations, contact center, vertical applications. What we do is that the technology roadmap supports these goals with research of technical tech trends and we create proof of concepts. I have within my organization, mitel Labs, which is our incubation research lab and they are in the forefront of innovation, of course, and they are researching with top experts in various tech fields. I have not only AI as a key technology, but also researching IoT augmented virtual reality. So there are several fronts that we research With. The Mitel Labs, work as in the forefront of it, we take the outcomes, recommendations and work with the product team on the portfolio how the technical roadmap aligns and support.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So you've also partnered with a couple of great technology companies Zoom and Genesis technology companies Zoom and Genesys. Maybe talk a little bit about what those partnerships mean for your approach to innovation and the working relationship you have with them?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and very important announcements recently. As you know, we continue to create strategic business and technology partnerships. So on the business side, as you mentioned very well, zoom and Genesys are the most visible ones. From the business side, as you mentioned very well, zoom and Genes are the most visible ones. From the innovation perspective, I'm also very closely working with partners in R&D front. I see the R&D partners, technology partners, also enhancing R&D investment. The large partnerships as Zoom and Genes are more evident, but we have several technology partners that are helping augment our solution landscape. We are now in a few weeks we are officially launching GA for our new contact center, mitel CX. So fully modernized and brand new contact center solution, our mainstream contact center offering moving forward. So we spent significant effort there to bring AI to this offering, covering a spectrum of that spectrum of contact center needs for modern usage. However, Genesys plays a role into our landscape and for very large cloud contact centers, particularly the cloud emphasis, we are offering Genesys as part of the CCC portfolio. So we have the two products. Certainly, our product covers a good chunk of the market, but we also have Genesys for specific customers and regions around the world.
Speaker 2:On the Zoom side different story correct. So it's more than a business partnership. It is a technology partnership as well. So the partnership with Zoom is what we call the hybrid communications partnership, and hybrid in the sense that there are elements of the solution in private cloud or hosted cloud connected to Zoom as the desktop, as the collaboration component. So this is possible today with other collaboration applications I don't have to name them.
Speaker 2:But the way we did with Zoom is that the Zoom integration is a client component in the Zoom desktop that reflects the Mitel platforms, the voice platforms. So we worked very closely with the Zoom colleagues in the last six to nine months and we believe we have and I'm sure we do have this most seamless integration, taking the best technical solution components from Zoom desktop and the Mitel voice platforms. So it will give you the same experience even in the mobile client applications because it's fully integrated and takes advantage of the Zoom capabilities of the desktop. So in our view, this is user experience at its best. That's how we see it. We're very pleased with this. This week we had the Zoom sales kickoff in Vegas. Our CMO was there with other colleagues. So very good acceptance of the market to our offering together with Zoom, and we continue to drive that as our main driver of hybrid communications.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Well, win-win for customers, that's for sure. Let's dive a little bit deeper into AI. As you know, it's reshaping everything in communications and customer experience customer engagement Maybe talk a little bit more about what that means in terms of your solutions and how AI-powered CX is becoming inherent to everything Customer engagement, customer satisfaction and beyond. When do you see some of those benefits coming to life?
Speaker 2:Yes, at Mitel, we're definitely putting a lot of effort there. So we're seeing the first iterations of our products out of the door now and we delivered AI across the portfolio in the last 12 months. You see the new contact center, mitel CX. Mitel CX is coming with AI assistant, multimodal AI capabilities, transcription of calls and recordings, analytics and there's a lot of capabilities that we built around it. So it's become a very powerful contact center with virtual agents, with AI assistance and transcription and all capabilities around it. So very, very good. I'm very excited with that announcement and getting it out of the door. Finally, in addition, as part of Mitel Labs, we have AI research and we have some roadmap plans going on.
Speaker 2:We have three fronts that I can illustrate here. One is edge AI. So it's part of our hybrid deployment strategy to serve our customers and industries and countries where they have strong regulations, where they don't want to use the traditional AI in the cloud. So we are working to announce later this year the adoption of the NET language model with relatively modest compute requirements. This will serve many of our customers and give them the confidence that their valuable knowledge base is protected.
Speaker 2:Also, we are working on voice AI, speech AI, assistance. So I think you see the norm today is still chat-driven assistance and text-driven. So we are working on voice-driven and we're implementing our first speech AI assistance. As you know, voice is in Mitel's DNA correct and we use that to ensure scalability, latency, low latency and accuracy in the voice processing initiative. Low latency and accuracy in the voice processing initiative, giving our customers the knowledge and experience that we bring and the safety that we bring with voice. Ai in the Edge and Workflow Studio, as I mentioned before, is kind of a Swiss army knife for communications workflow and we incorporated the first AI agent there from OpenAI very recently and we'll continue adding more, including our Edge AI language model, to it. So our goal is to have language model agnostic incorporation in Workplace 3 so we can create and design solutions for customers with some degree of flexibility.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, that's going to be a game changer for employee experience, and you know the frontline workers you mentioned healthcare workers who are kind of overloaded by all the communications inputs. Can't wait to see that in action. Lot of time talking about security and compliance with customers and meeting their very demanding requirements, particularly in Europe, when it comes to data protection, data sovereignty. What are some of the issues that are top of mind around their concerns these days?
Speaker 2:Yes. Well, security must be always done by design correct. It's never an absolute thought. Our solutions have been designed through times to ensure that we take benefit of our knowledge and experience to secure customer data, ensure all the communication can be end-to-end encrypted for signaling, for media content, data at rest. In addition to that, not only security of the communication but also security of the user, user validation, user authentication is key. I'm working with a startup that has a very reliable AI voice authentication that so far has been capable of avoiding deepfakes of voice and very reliable their algorithm and their model and we're going to partner with them to offer voice authentication with AI and we plan to build two-factor authentication within. In other words, you call a contact center, the contact center greets you and tells you what's your security code one, two, three, four it is already authenticated. What's your security code one, two, three, four it is already authenticated. The second factor as well as my voice footprint, my voice print to determine it's me that's calling. That saves a lot of time in the contact center From a security perspective. That will be important for our customers.
Speaker 2:On compliance, we have customers, as I mentioned, in Germany, for example, very regulated market that demands strong elements of compliance.
Speaker 2:We have customers, as I mentioned, in Germany, for example, a very regulated market that demands strong elements of compliance, but also certain industries finance healthcare that are really compliance-driven HIPAA and some other requirements of it. What we're trying to ensure that we bring in our solutions always is compliance to data protection, data sovereignty, whatever is required For AI. We are addressing requirements from the European Union AI Act. So all of this we need to watch and monitor and attend. For For us, germany is one of our largest markets and highly regulated, and the discussion I mentioned to you the point we're researching now about edge AI. That should be where compliance, audits and validations are key, and we believe that will improve the relationship with customers and adoption of AI will be better and less concerning. As we see today, given our global presence, it's a business that never stops. Our compliance is always evolving and what we're trying to do is to keep up to them, ensure that we understand regulatory requirements and how we implement them across our portfolio.
Speaker 1:Wow, brilliant. So much going on. I had no idea everything that's going on. It's really exciting and congratulations onwards and upwards. Such good work. Can't wait to see it in action at customers.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, we're very excited with it.
Speaker 1:All right, Louise. Well, thanks so much and enjoy your week, Thanks everyone.
Speaker 2:See you in Orlando, take care.
Speaker 1:Take care, bye-bye.